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Christine Korsgaard

Christine Korsgaard is an American philosopher who taught for many years at Harvard and is one of the leading contemporary interpreters and developers of…

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On the Coordinates: 3.2.2 Duty-Based Approaches

Also known as Christine M. Korsgaard

b. 1952 · Harvard; Cambridge, Massachusetts

Traditions: Analytic

Schools: Kantianism

Christine Korsgaard is an American philosopher who taught for many years at Harvard and is one of the leading contemporary interpreters and developers of Kant's ethics. In The Sources of Normativity she argued that moral obligation is grounded in the reflective structure of human agency: in acting we must value our own humanity, and so the humanity of others. She has extended this constructivist account to self-constitution and to our obligations to other animals.

Key ideas

  • Normativity arises from reflective self-consciousness: we need reasons in order to act.
  • Valuing anything requires valuing our own humanity, which commits us to valuing humanity in others.
  • Through action, agents constitute themselves as unified persons.
  • Kantian ethics, properly developed, grounds obligations to non-human animals.

Major works

  • The Sources of Normativity (1996)
  • Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996)
  • Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (2009)
  • Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (2018)

In the conversation

In the Coordinates

The questions of philosophy where Christine Korsgaard takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.